Why do people IT get paid high salaries?

In My Humble Opinion
21

This is really a question that I think I could spend days & days on, and still not answer your question.

So let me just take a data point of two and hope this helps somewhat.

I’ve been doing this for a living since 1983. And oh, boy, have things changed. And are changin ever faster. But one thing I’ve noticed is that not everyone in this biz takes home the Big Bucks.

I know some genius-level programmer-types who have made it really, really, big–and others who make tens of thousands of dollars less than I do. Sometimes it’s luck, being in the right place at the right time. Sometimes it’s getting stuck in a dead-end job endlessly coding right down ont he bare metal with bosses who don’t begin to understand what you do.

But if there’s one thing I do see, it is that there are a large number of the higher-paid personnel in my industry who have excellent technical skills, yes, BUT they have some other skills that have put them ahead of the pack.

Like being able to talk intelligently to the IT customer and translate their needs into a working solution. Like being able to explain to them whatever issues without going into computer jargon. Like knowing the language of the finance people and the accountants.

And so on. In other words, people skills, business skills, and communication skills. The computer stuff just gets your foot in the door. Living in the real life corporate (or military) world and relating to your customers is very often what makes the diff.

Just like a lot of other job categories. We ain’t so different.

(Except that we have to expend a lot of time and effort to stay somewhat current in the evolving technology)

22

Thankfully much of IT is on a business level and the schooling we take works on taking advantage of that. Fortunately if your cries of doom come true, adapting is something an IT professional is going to be able to do.

Unfortunately I think you are wrong wrong wrong. Not that I don’t think someday computers are going to be able to code themselves, but that it isn’t anywhere in my lifetime. It would take AI or pretty darn near close to do that level of abstraction. Coding requires close interaction with the customer, and unless the computer is sentient and can ask questions and make confirmations, it will still require a middle man to operate the software that will make the program. That middleman will have to be the IT guy. Business will not want to trust their data to some uber computer that is owned by another company. Software isn’t going to lay wire and maintain networks. Somebody has to maintain the servers, the networks, the communications and all the various software that runs them.

Two jobs right there are safe for a long, long time. Database Administrators and Network Gurus. Data recovery is another job that will always be needed as well.

The noises you are making just sounds like crazy talk. We went through all these predictions of doom when manufacturing jobs started working with robots. A lot of jobs got replaced or job duties changed, but the doom all the crazies were proclaiming to be around the corner with no jobs and “robots will be doing all of our work” just didn’t happen.

And it aint going to happen in the IT world.

23

Whatever helps you sleep at night.

24

Like LiveOnAPlane, this is a question I love talking about.

First, I did not get specific with what I meant by IT knowledge. Sure, DOS and BASIC (and the knowledge of those things) is on the way out. People who only know those things are doomed to a life of burger flipping, yada yada yada.

But I said “IT guys.” IT guys adapt. They know that knowledge of a particular program or language isn’t important, it’s knowing about computer technology in general.

This nicely moves into my second point, this information is not being spread half as fast as the doom and gloomers predict it would. People don’t know this stuff and it will take a long time before something as simple as HTML is considered common knowledge.

And to this I say, my job (librarian) has long been considered the job that was next in line to be consumed by a program. Or more specifically, the Internet.

Looking at the people and questions I interact with every day (hell, looking at some of my fellow library school students) proves to me that I will never be “replaced by a program.” The average person doesn’t know enough to do all the things they want to do on their own. And they don’t want to learn.

Yup, I think I’ll be employable for a good, long time.

25

Librarians, yep, that’s exactly what I was talking about. Books and such. You use computers too. Oh, I see, information and technology. That’s what IT means. Books are forever.

26

Well, whatever makes your little life seem interesting and more complex than it really is…

Seriously, is your life so boring you dream up these apocalyptic “visions?” Visions similar to other visions in the last 30+ years. None of those visions of the future panned out, and neither will this one. It doesn’t “help me to sleep at night” it just makes me a stable contributer to society. A sane person.

But you keep on thinking and dreaming of that future that will never happen. I guess it gives you some meaning to your life.

27

Speaking as a person on the client side of this (although we have an internal IT department where I work, it’s still set up on a client/vendor model), I think it comes down to a combination of skill and risk.

Many jobs take specialized skills. But the overall operation of the place can absorb the absence of skilled folks in many positions if need be. Whether it’s because someone is out due to an emergency, or one of those things where you have a person in a job who simply isn’t that great at their job, we can keep things moving without too much impact to the overall success of the organization.

IT feels different in this respect. I suppose IT people with less than proficient skills could keep the place going day to day, but what about in an emergency? I could do a lot of jobs other than my own if emergency necessitated it, but none of those jobs are IT jobs. We are so dependent on IT that we’d be in insta-crisis if things went wrong. I think this is a mix of reality and perception – it really would be bad if our IT systems failed, and on top of that, management perceives this as a Very Bad Thing, possibly worse in our imaginations. There is a ripple effect, if the IT department fails, many other people in non-IT jobs would see their efficiency plummet. Sure, there are tasks I could do the old-fashioned way, but doing so would take 100% of my time to do 10% of my job, and this would be happening throughout the institution – 90% of what I get paid to do would be left undone.

So they get paid more in order to attract and retain people with greater than proficient skills. I do think this is going to level out at least somewhat soon, as more people enter the field attracted by the high salaries. Our IT department is now considerably larger than it was 10 years ago, and so they probably have that same ability within their office that the rest of us do outside – like in any other field, there are going to be some employees who just aren’t that hot (that’s just the law of averages, some people are going to play the role of deadweight) and a larger department is better at picking up the slack so that a less than proficient person might be able to slide by for a while. There’s still an expectation that it’s “all hands on deck” for a weekend or late night emergency, but I think this will be changing as well, so perhaps such a high salary won’t be needed as much to offset this inconvenience.

And a final thought – if the salaries in the field normalize, the senior IT managers are going to be the last to feel it. I feel lucky that where I work, even the most senior people have the hands on skills, in combination with the management skills needed to work with the rest of the organization. Things change so fast in the industry that I imagine they need to work to keep their ground skills so sharp (or, it’s possible that they are also really good at conning me to believe they do this, in which case their leadership skills are not just good, they’re stellar).

28

Getting back to this part, A DBA or network guy in a large company will get paid more than a software developer. It mostly has to do with emergency situations,and high profile. When an important server goes down, everybody up to the CIO and CEO usually hear about it. And the most important thing is to get it back up quickly. Say there are 5000 internal users who get paid 20/hr on average. When the server goes down and they can’t do their jobs the company is wasting $100,000 an hour on people sitting with thumbs up their asses. It gets even worse if it’s a customer facing application and every minute can be costing sales and cutomers. So a well payed DBA or network expert can easily be justified as a money savings in the long run is they can cut a couple hours off outages over the course of the year, which they usually can.

Software developers are less likely to be noticed in the crises times, and usually management can’t justify higher salaries as easily.

29

I was thinking about this last night, and I realized that I hadn’t thought about one key point, similar to what wolfman says about keeping up the key parts of a company. You have to take into account the business, and what’s important to the organization as a whole.

I’ve spent most of my career working in software companies. The software engineers who work in these places are considered the key employees; they’re making the thing that keeps the company going. The work tends is demanding, and the payscale for those employees is high. They get the window offices and the perks and the nice stock options. These are the places where senior engineers are making well into the six figures, with stock options and other perks. The IT people, not so much.

However, and I keep forgetting this, there’s also tons of organizations whose primary focus is NOT software development that also hire programmers. Hospitals, large insurance companies, etc etc. In these organizations, programmers are secondary. They might write the website, or some piece of application software. But they’re not key players in the organization. IT people are more key players. I can see the gap in salary there.

Er…dnoonan? You are displaying your own ignorance here. BASIC is alive and well in the form of Visual BASIC and is still being used to create web sites and other types of smaller programs. DOS is not a language. Not now, never has been.

30

Is this a particularly lame dig at my job? Are you saying troubleshooting PC problems and working the reference desk answering computer questions for the public in a town library doesn’t make me part of the IT industry?

I should tell my boss that the next time something breaks and I just want to take a nap.

31

The key skill for a mid-level IT person is problem solving. And sometimes, they are mighty complex problems. A network is running very slowly. How come? A server keeps dropping offline. How come? To solve these problems, IT people have to think on their feet, and draw from a large well of experience and knowledge. They have to know the software in the computer. They have to understand the physical networks. They have to be able to use sophisticated diagnostics hardware. They have to be mechanically adept enough to pull wires through walls, assemble equipment racks, install wiring nearly in complex bundles, etc. There’s no single subject that’s hard to learn, but there’s a lot to learn. And more importantly, a lot to keep learning. IT people have to study and upgrade their skills constantly. And a lot of this learning has to come on the job. You can teach people the facts in a classroom, but there’s no substitute for actually working with hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of various networked machines and keeping them running efficiently through various failures, mis-configurations and end-user screwups.

I’m pretty good at IT, and I’ve done IT jobs all the way up from pulling Cat-5 cable to managing a 150 person development shop with 300 computers. But the best IT guys could still run rings around me. Most of the time, the job is dead simple. Run backup schedules, re-image some computers, install a new network switch, set up a new telephone for someone. But you earn the big bucks when you get a call that says, “The network is down” and you have no idea why. Or a server that is used by 100 people starts randomly failing and the company is losing $1000 every time it crashes.

For higher level IT people, the key skills are planning and management. Now you’re more like a combination between a mid-level manager and an architect. You have to work out annual budgets for IT hardware. You have to plan upgrades of network infrastructures. If a new office gets opened, you have to work out the IT plan for it - wiring plan, where the server room will be, what kind of air conditioning it needs, how many switches will be required, how many subnets there will be, how security will work, etc. You have to prepare for ISO audits, and work out disaster recovery plans (very difficult for large organizations) This is a complex job, and the difference between doing it right and doing it wrong can cost the company huge dollars in lost productivity.

Those are the IT people that make big dollars. The junior IT people, the guys who set up client computers, maintain the odd web page, run backups, and do other low-level grunt work used to get paid a lot during the dot-com boom, but their salaries have fallen back to earth. There are lots of those kinds of people around - people who take a 6-month to 2-year diploma in computer technology and are just starting in the field. But in my experience, for every 10 of those people who come along, only one or two have the brains and intellectual curiousity and desire to continually learn that will allow them to move up into the real high-paying IT jobs. The others eventually migrate into other positions or leave the industry over time.

32

I think the stereotypical “IT” guy gets paid well (not great, but well) for reasons that plumbers and electricians get paid well:

  1. It’s a skill that not everyone possesses (and can seem difficult to outsiders), and

  2. If something goes wrong, it can go horribly wrong.

Seriously, I’ve done some stuff that I’d pay an electrician $100 an hour to do. But, a lot of people are like, “I’m just NOT dealing with electricity. I’ll get shocked, or blow something up or start a fire.”

I think that people still worry about all their data/email/work being wiped out permanently.

33

Well, okay, if you leave out the Technology part of Information Technology, I guess what we do is easy and cheap. :dubious:

34

You know, I think you’re right. Younger people are comfortable using computers as tools, but they don’t seem to be any more comfortable than their older counterparts with bending the computers to their will (mwahahahahaha).

35

And if you are externally facing at all - i.e. you consult, you deal with clients - or even you are internal to the corporation but interface with external business units, you have an added skill set. The intersection between “problem solving,” “technical skills” and “not being a patronizing jackass when talking to clients” is a small subset of people.

36

Those who patronize others are almost always relegated to internal work only. In my group, we use the help desk for our daily computer needs even though we’re all very capable of maintaining our own little PC infrastructure. There are two reasons for this: a) we don’t really have the time and b) we’re watching and will recruit from within before considering outside candidates. It’s funny that some of them don’t get this. I’ve gotten responses from a couple people like, “Why can’t you do this yourself?” Bzzt, wrong answer. You’ve just screwed yourself out of a promotion someday.

I work in a client-facing business unit and we have a pretty small group (I’m the senior network guy (there are two others)) and we have some basic criteria:

  1. 10 or more years of IT experience on a variety of systems, preferably more than one company worked
  2. Nice person
  3. Flexible with client demands
  4. Does not take things personally
  5. Extremely fast learner – if you’re shown once, it’s assumed that you know it*
    It’s not a big list and it applies across all functions. Specific knowledge of the job to which they’re applying as assumed.
  • if you can’t retain it, you write it down. It’s expected that you are a student in your field and will practice any and all methods of design and troubleshooting on your own without prodding, this includes exploring new knowledge.
37

Computer literacy these days seems to be knowing how to use, PowerPoint and finding google. I agree that kids don’t know what is going on under the surface any better than most people of my generation. My 20 year old daughter still calls me with computer questions. :slight_smile: I started programming in high school in machine language (not assembler) on a bare machine. I think IT people and some coders can model the underlying issues, even with very little evidence. I suspect computers are magic black boxes to most people, though kids are good at working the controls on the outside.

38

People have been predicting programs writing themselves for over 30 years. While lots of languages today take away the low level grunt work, no body but a person is going to take unclear and contradictory specifications and turn them into code. That’s going to take really good AI, and I’m not holding my breath until that happens.

39

Exactly right. A lot of the time, my job is barely chimpworthy: adding users to security groups, resetting passwords, cycling boxes to clear memory leaks; I could teach all but the stupidest person to do these things in half a day, tops.

But when a financial institution calls us and tells us that we had a transmission failure that caused a single file to drop out at some unknown point in the last twenty-four hours and I need to delve into ten-year-old undocumented spaghetti code and compare expected results step by step with the barely comprehensible log entries spread across two applications and five databases to identify the affected file, and then recreate, top to bottom, the necessary data conditions that will allow the automated processes to pick up the file in question and seamlessly insert the missing transaction into the appropriate datastream… it would take months to get somebody up to speed, starting from scratch, on all the necessary components, and I am absolutely earning my paycheck.

And I would add another element that hasn’t gotten much attention beyond a couple of mentions so far in the thread: I need to explain everything that I did to identify the problem, and everything that I need to do to fix it, in such a way that tech-ignorant managers can make a decision to approve my plan, and such that tech-ignorant auditors who come along weeks or months later can follow the details of the incident and sign off on what was done as meeting financial controls.

That’s why I get paid what I get paid. And there isn’t an automated script in the world that could do any of it.

40

Do IT people really get paid that high a salary? How do their salaries compare to other skilled professionals in the corporation?

The trend has always been to replace dangerous, repetetive or complex technical tasks with automation that either simplifies it to the point where that human can be an 18 year old high school graduate or eliminates the job altogether. That has not brought us the 4 hour workday. There will always be work to do that requires people to do it. I started my career in programming. I do more management consulting, project management and business development now. I decided very early on that jumping from one technology platform to the next for 40 years was not what I wanted to do with my career.